


Under My Skin

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sick Sam Winchester, Transdermal Alcohol Poisoning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:14:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25416007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: A hunt goes wrong, and there's one cure. Unfortunately, Sam's not going to like it.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 11
Kudos: 172





	Under My Skin

**Author's Note:**

> I've yet to inflict this particular brand of weirdness on the Supernatural fandom, but now here we are.

“Is that… safe?”

Dean looks up but doesn’t stop pouring vodka into the dingy motel tub, one bottle after another. “Safer than having all your skin slowly peel off thanks to that hydra that bled all over you? Gee, Sammy, I don’t know. Let me think.”

Sam sighs. “Point taken.”

He’s sitting on the motel toilet stripped to his underwear, shivering faintly in the air conditioned room. Dean had plunked him there half an hour ago, along with growled warnings to  _ not move, I swear to god, Sammy, I will fucking kill you if you move a fucking muscle.  _ He’d stripped Sam out of his clothes in a panicked frenzy, swearing under his breath and ignoring the way he was getting the blue-black blood all over his own hands, carefully holding the shirt collar away from Sam’s skin so he could raise his arms and slip his head free without getting any more of the poison on his face.

That was before Dean had disappeared and, from the looks of it, raided an entire liquor store. Two or three liquor stores.

It isn’t all vodka. Apparently they didn’t have that much vodka in the place, so it’s a slew of bottom shelf booze, gutter whiskey and bathtub gin—all the gutrot Dean could find on short notice.

“How’d you pay for all that?” Sam asks.

“I didn’t.”

Sam doesn’t ask any more questions. He sits on his hands and tries not to scratch because it’s  _ itchy, _ and if the hydra’s blood doesn’t peel all his skin off, he might just do it himself. He wants to scratch so fucking badly. He bites his lip instead—hard. Bites it ‘til blood.

Hydra blood seeps into your system through your skin—what’s left of your skin by the time it’s done. It burns you up from the inside out, turns your insides molten until they ooze right out of your every orifice. He’d seen the victims with their eerie blood-red tears leaking from empty sockets, eyeballs burned clean out of their skulls and brain matter trickling down from their ears.

Movement makes it faster; water makes it worse. The faster your heart pumps, the quicker the poison circulates through your veins.

Your only hope is to wash it off as well as you can, as quick as you can, but  _ water makes it worse— _ enter a phone call from Bobby and a recipe ripped from a witch’s ancient diary, instructing the victim to ‘Bathe in Ether for One Quartre Hour’. They don’t have ether. They do have a few handles of New Amsterdam.

Sam’s just trying not to die.

Dean tosses the last empty bottle aside. “Okay, we’re good. Hurry up and get in.”

Sam gets up with a groan, trying to ignore the firescratchitnow _ burning _ sensation running up and down his body. He shucks his boxers and leaves them on the floor—they’ll have to burn those later—and sticks his feet in the tub.

It stings. Sam finds cuts he didn’t know he had, little invisible abrasions along the soles of his feet, his ankles and calves, not to mention the gaping slice taken out of his side by the hydra’s claws.

Sam hisses as he sinks down into the liquid. “Holy  _ fuck.” _

“Suck it up, Sammy. It’s not that bad.”

Sam manages a glare from beyond his grimace. “You try it, then.”

Dean sticks his hands in the water, rubbing them together to dislodge the hydra venom still clinging to the palms of his hands. “Well I would, princess, but the bath’s only big enough for one.”

Sam rolls his eyes, but he’s got to admit that bickering with Dean did the trick. He’s now fully seated in the bath, and it burns like hell, but at least there’s no skin left untouched. He leans all the way back and rests his head against the back lip of the porcelain tub, closing his eyes with a sigh.

“Tell you what, you can drink it when I’m done. Bet you’ve always wanted to drink my bathwater.”

Dean flicks a few drops of the evil-smelling booze mixture into Sam’s face. “Gross. I’m not exactly angling to drink Sam soup, okay?”

Sam huffs a laugh.

The burn from the liquor is—it’s not exactly going away, but the quality of it is changing. The fumes are going to his head, and he’s starting to feel a little floaty, all the sharp edges of reality shellacked over with a soft veil of pleasure.

He laughs again, softer.

Dean glances at him. “You doing okay there, hot shot?”

Sam nods, lifting a hand to wave off Dean’s concern. It makes a little splash in the pool of alcohol, and Sam swishes his hand through the booze, suddenly fascinated by the heavy viscosity of it. It’s thick and syrupy. It feels funny between his fingers.

“Doing great,” Sam says, closing his eyes again. He opens them and peers over at Dean. “How much longer?”

Dean checks the face of his phone. “Ten more minutes.”

Sam nods. He starts feeling weird at the six minute mark, woozy and tired, like he’s had too much to drink. He pushes the feeling down and tries to focus on the feel of the bath against his skin. The hydra blood’s itch is finally starting to abate, the raging burn of it subsiding to an irritating prickle. It reminds Sam of the time he got poison oak as a kid, miserable and covered in itchy hives that wouldn’t stop cropping up until they sent all his hiking gear through the hottest wash cycle to clean away the oils.

Nine more minutes.

Nausea takes hold in another two. Dean notices it before he does, in the misty seconds before the sick-hot feeling at the base of his skull—the one flickering his eyelids shut—resolves into a full-blown need to puke.

“Sammy, how you doing?” Dean asks again.

“Fine,” Sam says around gritted teeth.

Dean’s gone and back in a flash, just over to the other side of the small, dingy bathroom to retrieve the little plastic wastebasket. “If you’re gonna hurl, do it in here.”

Not a minute too soon. Sam grabs the sides of the trash can and retches, emptying his dinner into the can. He wipes a wet hand over the back of his mouth, miserable. The smell of liquor on his fingers and the odor of vomit wafting up from the wastebasket makes him want to retch again.

“Uh-uh,” Dean says, prying the trash can from his grip. “Hands stay in the bath. You need this, I’ll hold it.”

“Dean—” Sam starts, but he doesn’t get any farther before the rest of the contents of his stomach are coming up. The force of the cramps wracks his belly, leaving his abdomen feeling squeezed and raw. He dry heaves a few times when he’s done, until he’s got nothing left and he’s spitting sour bile into the can.

He’s gasping by the time he’s finished. He’s absolutely felt worse in this life—he’s been stabbed, after all. He’s been shot. But right now, he can’t imagine ever feeling any worse than this.

When it looks like Sam’s really done—when his stomach’s got nothing left to give up—Dean takes the trash can over to the toilet and slops the contents into the bowl. He rinses it in the sink and tosses the dirty, pinkish water before flushing it all down. The lack of smell is a modest improvement—not that Sam’s in any fit state to enjoy it.

Dean comes back with a little plastic cup full of water. Sam reaches to take it before he remembers—arms in the bath. He struggles upright and lets Dean feed it to him, feeling half humiliated and half warmed by the care. He’s naked and miserable in a cold bath. He feels sick to his stomach, and Dean’s seeing all of it.

It’s not like Dean’s never seen him sick. When he’d get sick as a kid, it was always Dean who’d nurse him back to health. Dean who’d bring him Campbell’s chicken soup and tea from the dusty box of Lipton that seemed to live in the back of every cupboard of every house in America. Dean’s seen Sam sick, seen him whiny, seen him snot-nosed and feverish and weak.

It feels different, somehow, now that they’re adults. It feels different now that Sam can take care of himself—he’s  _ supposed _ to take care of himself. He doesn’t want Dean to see him like this.

It doesn’t much matter. It’s not like he can do anything about it anyway—he feels too weak for that. Even lifting his arm seems like a chore, so he lets Dean feed him cool, blissful water.

He takes a big gulp of the water before Dean pulls it away, leaving Sam gasping and straining toward the cup.

“Hey.”

“Little sips,” Dean says, rubbing Sam’s back. “C’mon, little sips, Sammy. Don’t want you getting sick again.”

Sam obliges, meek and dizzy.

Dean feeds him half the contents of the cup before setting it aside.

He rubs small circles across Sam’s back, and Sam tilts forward to allow it, letting his head loll. It feels nice, insofar as anything can feel nice at this exact moment.

“I don’t feel good,” Sam says.

Dean’s hand never stops moving, rubbing slow, soothing motions into Sam’s skin. “I know, Sammy. I know. Just a little longer, okay?”

Sam nods. He doesn’t ask how much time is left on the clock—doesn’t want to know, really. Dean is watching, and that’s what matters. Dean will tell him when it’s time. When it’s time to come out, how much longer he has to endure.

The dizziness only gets worse. His sense of balance is so skewed that he doesn’t realize he’s slipping beneath the surface of the pool until he feels Dean’s hands under his armpits, hoisting him up.

“Whoa there, none of that. You’re not going for that kind of swim.”

Sam tries to mutter something in reply—maybe a joke—but it comes out unintelligible. He tries again, to no better effect. His tongue feels thick and slow in his mouth. His vision is starting to fade black at the edges. He’s too sick to even find it alarming.

He sees Dean in flashes—the wrinkled furrow between his brows, the lean lines of his forearms. Consciousness is… iffy. He’s not sure if he’s asleep or awake.

“Hey, hey. Talk to me, Sammy.”

Sam groans. He grips blindly at Dean’s sleeve, coming up with a fistful of fabric and maybe pinching Dean’s skin in the process. He clings on for dear life and tries to follow the sound of Dean’s voice, ending up braining himself against the side of the tub in the process. Dean’s hand comes up to try to stop the impact of porcelain and skull, but holding Sam’s head above water, he’s too slow.

Sam hears him swear from very far away, and then it’s lights out.

* * *

He’s clean when he comes to—clean and dry and wearing a t-shirt and boxers. It’s the fourth or fifth thing he notices. The first is the stabbing, ice pick pain lancing his head. It feels like he got hit by a fucking truck. Sam moans and rolls over, scrabbling for a bag, a bucket, anything. Everything is about fifty times too bright. The bedside lamp casts the most horrific light Sam’s ever experienced, all of it stabbing and prying right into his brain.

His hands find the bathroom trash can beside the bed, and he pukes up nothing but clear water for round two.

Dean is the second thing he notices, warm and dry and plastered tightly to his side, sitting right beside Sam on the bed.

“Sammy?”

“Lights,” Sam croaks around a throat that feels like it’s been scoured raw with sandpaper. “Turn off—” he motions weakly in the direction of the lamp. “Lights.”

Dean moves with a speed Sam’s only ever seen on hunts. Just like that, the light is doused, and Sam sighs with relief, relaxing back into the bed.

“How’re you feeling?” Dean asks.

Sam groans weakly.

“That bad, huh?”

Sam spies the bottle of Gatorade sitting on the nightstand and grabs for it artlessly. He drinks as much as he can stand, letting the thin, artificial blue taste chase the awful funk out of his mouth.

When he speaks again, it feels slightly less like swallowing broken glass. “Feels like I drank an entire liquor store.”

“That’s… uh, not entirely inaccurate. Turns out you can absorb the stuff through your skin—who’d have thought.”

“Me,” Sam grumbles, but he hurts too much to argue. The night has started to give way to dawn, and palest light creeps around the dusty edges of the curtain. It’s much too bright. “’Least I still have skin.”

Dean blows out a slow breath. “At least.”

Sam closes his eyes and hopes like hell he’ll pass out again—sleeping through what is very probably going to be the mother of all hangovers seems like his best option. Dean is so still beside him. Sam can feel Dean looking at him, and it nettles at something lodged firmly in the back of his brain, the animal part that just wants to sleep.

“Stop staring.”

There’s a rustle of cloth as Dean shrugs. He stretches out beside Sam and snugs him close.

Sam makes a weak moan of protest at the jostling motion. “Stop moving so much.”

“Brat,” Dean says, but he holds still.

He tucks his chin over Sam’s head and wraps him up tight. His arms keep out the chill.

**Author's Note:**

> This all happened thanks to an argument about the effects of alcohol baths. I assumed ethanol would need contact with mucus membranes in order to be absorbed, but apparently that's not the case. Alcohol is a solvent, and your skin is great at keeping things outside your body—but only to a certain point. Sitting in a large quantity of alcohol is apparently a very dangerous thing to do.
> 
> Is this good science? I have no idea. At least a handful of people have died this way, and signs point to "soaking yourself in high proof alcohol is a very, very bad idea."
> 
> Come say what's up on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture), if you wanna.


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